Our worst decisions and actions are those without which society would have been better off. To publish a newspaper headline announcing that Truman lost to Dewey. The decision to invade at the Bay of Pigs. These have their equally headline-worthy engineering analogues: The decision to ...

Guest Editor's Introduction • George K. Thiruvathukal, Computing in Science and Engineering and Computing Now • November 2012 I consider myself a bit of a language junkie, although I'm more properly termed a languages person trapped in a systems researcher's body. In the early part of...

Access to medical care is sometimes difficult for citizens living in distant and underserved areas. However, surprisingly, even citizens living in large cities in BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — may find it hard to reach medical services. Not being a...

Predicting X from Twitter is a popular fad within the Twitter research subculture. It seems both appealing and relatively easy. Among such studies, electoral prediction is maybe the most attractive, and a growing body of literature exists on this topic. This research problem isn't onl...

Furthermore, once we identify tools such as static code analyzers to assist us in identifying technical debt, there's a danger of equating it with whatever our tools can detect. This approach leads to leaving aside large amounts of potential technical debt that's undetectable by tools...

One only has to look at how we dress to see that engineers are not a very faddish lot. But engineering has roots in the sciences. That science may often be driven more by fashion than by need is one of our disturbing realizations of the past two centuries. Science is sexy, and sexines...

The Computer Society has a chapter reimbursement program whereby chapter officers can be reimbursed for chapter expenses (when approved by the local chair) up to $150 per chapter per year. All you have to do is submit an IEEE reimbursement form, along with receipts (scans), by email t...